More than sixty years later

Sixty-three years ago, on June 22, 1941, 3 million German soldiers and half a million from other Nazi-dominated countries went over the lines and attacked the Soviet Union. This, not D-Day, was the largest military invasion in human history.

Some 2,700 German planes took out 4,000 Soviet planes; over 300,000 Red Army soldiers were captured. For the next two years and 11 months, more men fought on the Eastern Front than in all the other theaters of the war put together. The siege of Stalingrad from November 1941 to February 1943 was the largest siege battle ever, with hand-to-hand fighting as the Soviets defended the last block before the Volga River. The battle between the two armies' tanks at Kursk in July 1943 was the largest tank battle ever.

We are the fortunate legatees of this terrible warfare. Hitler and Stalin became allies when they signed their pact on Aug. 23, 1939; with Hitler's victories and Stalin's land grabs, most of the landmass of Eurasia was under totalitarian control when the attack of June 22, 1941, came. On that date, the United States was still six months away from war, and it is far from clear that the United States and Britain together could have dislodged either Hitler or Stalin. A very large part of the world seemed fated to live permanently in George Orwell's as yet unwritten "1984."

Hitler's attack meant a battle to the death between his Nazism and Stalin's communism. We think we know the outcome: Stalin won, and Eastern Europe remained communist until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

But in another sense, the outcome is still unfolding. In 1941, Germany and the Soviet Union were demographically the two largest nations in Europe: Prewar Germany had 80 million people, and the prewar Soviet Union 170 million, at a time when the United States had 130 million and Britain 46 million. Now those two great nations, which fought this horrifying war with such enormous casualties, are shrinking before our eyes. It is almost as if Russia and Germany are committing suicide, Russia rapidly and violently, Germany more slowly and in a more orderly fashion.

Life expectancy for males in Russia declined nearly five years between 1962 and 2002. Deaths exceeded births staring in the 1970s, and female fertility declined from 2.2 births in 1986 (2.1 is the replacement rate necessary for a stable population) to 1.2 in 1999. As a result, the population of the pared-back Russia fell from 148 million in 1992 to 144 million in 2003. Violent death rates doubled between 1965 and 2001, partly because of increasing alcoholism.

Russia, writes American Enterprise Institute demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, "is at the brink of a steep demographic decline -- a peacetime population hemorrhage framed by a collapse and a catastrophic surge, respectively, in the birth and death rates." Russia, which had 13 million young men in the 1990s, will at current rates have only 6 million by 2025. Russia is disappearing.

Germany isn't, but its problems are serious enough. The fertility rate there is 1.4, higher than some other European countries but far below the replacement rate. Germany's population is now 83 million, just slightly more than in 1940, but 8 percent of those are Turkish and other immigrants and guest workers, many not eligible for citizenship until recently. With its population declining and aging, Germany is going to find it impossible to maintain its generous welfare and retirement benefits without devastating its private sector economy, which is scarcely growing at all today. Immigration could help compensate, but Germany, like other continental states, has not been able to assimilate immigrants as well as the United States.

The world will not be better off with a shrinking Germany and a disappearing Russia. Behind these developments one senses a demoralization, a delayed reaction to the horrifying events of 1941-45 and the totalitarian regimes that battled to the death. Earlier this month, Americans celebrated the D-Day landings, the largest amphibious landing in history, and the sacrifices that Americans made in that great war. But the Germans and Russians and the peoples locked into war with them made numerically much greater sacrifices, sacrifices that still are scarring their countries today, and leading them toward decline and disappearance.

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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